Mozilla receives META Seal of Recognition for its Machine Learning efforts

Mozilla has been a pioneer and advocate for the web for more than 20 years now. We believe that the internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible for all people, no matter where they are and which language they speak.

With projects such as Common Voice and Deep Speech, Mozilla’s Machine Learning Group is working on advancing and democratizing voice recognition technology on the web. Now we are proud to have received the META Seal of Recognition for Mozilla’s initiative to integrate machine translation into the browser with our latest project called Bergamot, a cooperation with our partners, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Sheffield, Charles University, and Tartu University.

Bergamot is a fast and open machine translation engine that runs directly on users’ devices through the browser, allowing them to read a web page in their desired language while maintaining the page format. Unlike other cloud-based translation options, Bergamot preserves the user’s privacy and security. The project is starting with six EU languages (German, French, Spanish, Polish, Czech, and Estonian) and will then move on to cover all the 24 official languages of the EU, and beyond.

“Speech is increasingly becoming an essential way of interacting with the internet today. The selection of languages is however often limited and dictated by commercial interests of a few big industry players. We at Mozilla are guided by our open source principles to address this imbalance and to promote the development of the internet as a public resource,” says Kelly Davis, Manager of the Machine Learning Group at Mozilla.

Picture of Kelly Davis from Mozilla on stage at teh META Forum event 2019

Kelly Davis, Manager of the Machine Learning Group, at META-FORUM 2019. Photo: DFKI (European Language Grid)

Kelly Davis received the META Seal of Recognition on behalf of Mozilla in Brussels during the META-FORUM 2019, an international conference series on innovative language technologies that showcases the most recent developments in the European language technology industry. The Seal of Recognition is awarded to companies that enrich a multilingual European society with supportive products or technologies.

The Bergamot project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825303.